What follows happened, according to Sri Chaitanya-Bhagavata, during a night of extraordinary ecstasy that the text itself describes as lasting twenty-one hours, in which Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu revealed His divinity to one intimate devotee after another; secondary accounts place the scene at Srivasa Thakura's house in Navadwip. Shridhara's turn came in the middle of it. The Lord told him plainly to look — "O Shridhara, look at My form. Today I will award you the eight mystic perfections" — and showed him a four-armed form holding an enchanting flute, with Balarama standing at His right side, Ananta Sesha holding His thousand hoods overhead like an umbrella, and sages including Sanaka, Narada and Sukadeva looking on. It was the same identity Kavi-karnapura's Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika had already assigned him in the language of genealogy — Krishna and Balarama together, the very form the cowherd boy Kusumasava had once served in Vrindavana — now shown directly to the man who had spent years arguing with Him over banana leaves.
Shridhara did not take it calmly. He reeled and fell to the ground, struck with wonder, and when the Lord asked him to offer prayers, he could only answer that he was too foolish to find the words. Sri Chaitanya-Bhagavata says Sarasvati, the goddess of speech, appeared on his tongue by the Lord's own order, and it was through her that Shridhara began to speak — praising the Lord as the source of the mystic perfections, of prosperity and yoga, of devotional service and liberation, of Brahma and Shiva, all of it subordinate to Him, and confessing in the same breath that his own sinful heart had never once recognized who he had been arguing with. When the Lord pressed him afterward to ask for a boon, repeating "Ask, ask," Shridhara's first response was not eagerness but wariness — "O Lord, will You again deceive Me? Stay peaceful, for this will not be possible again" — the reaction of a man who had spent years being teased and was not sure, even now, whether to trust what he was seeing.
A Single Request #
When Shridhara did ask, he did not ask for wealth, mystic power, or liberation, though the Lord had offered all of it. According to Sri Chaitanya-Bhagavata, Madhya-khanda 9.223-225, his request was this: "Let that brahmana who forcibly took away my banana leaves be my Lord birth after birth. Let me always engage in the service of the lotus feet of that brahmana who constantly quarreled with me." A separate translation of the same verses, published by Gaudiya History, renders it with the same sense: "May that Brahmin who used to pinch my banana leaves and bark be my Lord, lifetime after lifetime. May that Brahmin who used to argue with me be my master, and I serve His lotus feet." However the exact wording is rendered, both translations agree on what mattered: the only thing Shridhara wanted, having just been shown that the person haggling with him every day was Krishna and Balarama combined, was to keep being haggled with, birth after birth. As he spoke, his love overcame him and he began crying loudly with his arms raised; the Vaishnavas gathered around him, seeing him weep, were overwhelmed and wept along with him.
What the Boon Says About Him #
It is worth noticing what Shridhara's request rules out. He does not ask to understand the Lord's pastimes, to be freed from material life, or to be given mystic powers he had just been offered outright — the very things the Lord's revelation had opened the door to. He asks only to remain, in every future life, the servant of the same brahmana who had underpaid him and teased him for years. It is the clearest statement the tradition preserves of what Shridhara's devotion actually was: not admiration for a Lord he had just discovered was extraordinary, but loyalty to a person he already loved, regardless of who that person turned out to be. That loyalty carried on well past this one extraordinary night, as told in Legacy and Remembrance.